The Limner

Deaf mute portrait artist

Mr. Tuttle had been argumentative from the beginning: about the fee—twelve dollars—the size of the canvas, and the prospect to be shown through the window. Fortunately, there had been swift accord about the pose and the costume. Over these, Wadsworth was happy to oblige the customs collector; happy also to give him the appearance, as far as it was within his skill, of a gentleman. That was, after all, his business. He was a limner but also an artisan, and paid at an artisan’s rate to produce what suited the client. In thirty years, few would remember what the collector of customs had looked like; the only relic of his physical presence after he had met his Maker would be this portrait. And, in Wadsworth’s experience, clients held it more important to be pictured as sober, God-fearing men and women than they did to be offered a true likeness. This was not a matter that perturbed him.

From the edge of his eye, Wadsworth became aware that his client had spoken, but he did not divert his gaze from the tip of his brush. Instead he pointed to the bound notebook in which so many sitters had written comments, expressed their praise and blame, wisdom and fatuity. He might as well have opened the book at any page and asked his client to select the appropriate remark left by a predecessor five or ten years before. The opinions of this customs collector so far had been as predictable as his waistcoat buttons, if less interesting. Fortunately, Wadsworth was paid to represent waistcoats, not opinions. Of course, it was more complicated than that: to represent the waistcoat, and the wig, and the breeches, was to represent an opinion—indeed, a whole corpus of them. The waistcoat and breeches showed the body beneath, as the wig and hat showed the brain beneath—though, in some cases, it was a pictorial exaggeration to suggest that any brains lay beneath.

He would be happy to leave this town, to pack his brushes and canvases, his pigments and palette, into the small cart, to saddle his mare, and then take the forest trails that, in three days, would lead him home. There he would rest, and reflect, and perhaps decide to live differently, without this constant travail of the itinerant. A peddler’s life; also a supplicant’s. As always, he had come to this town, taken lodgings by the night, and placed an advertisement in the newspaper, indicating his competence, his prices, and his availability. “If no application is made within six days,” the advertisement ended, “Mr. Wadsworth will quit the town.” He had already painted the small daughter of the drygoods salesman, and Deacon Zebediah Harries, who had given him Christian hospitality in his house, and recommended him to the collector of customs.

Mr. Tuttle had not offered lodging, but the limner willingly slept in the stable with his mare for company, and ate in the kitchen. And then there had been that incident on the third evening, against which he had failed—or felt unable—to protest. It had made him sleep uneasily. It had wounded him, too, if the truth were known. He ought to have written the collector down for an oaf and a bully—he had painted enough in his years—and forgotten the matter. Perhaps he should indeed consider his retirement, let his mare grow fat, and live from what crops he could grow and what farm stock he could raise. He could always paint windows and doors for a trade, instead of people; he would not judge this an indignity.

Late on the first morning, Wadsworth had been obliged to introduce the collector of customs to the notebook. The fellow, like many another, had imagined that merely opening his mouth wider might be enough to effect communication. Wadsworth had watched the pen travel across the page, and then the fore-finger tap impatiently. “If God is merciful,” the man had written, “perhaps in Heaven you will hear.” In reply, he had half smiled, and given a brief nod, from which surprise and gratitude might be inferred. He had read the thought many times before. Often it was a true expression of Christian feeling and sympathetic hope; occasionally, it represented, as now, a scarcely concealed dismay that the world contained those with such frustrating defects. Mr. Tuttle was among the masters who preferred their servants to be mute, deaf, and blind—except when his convenience required the matter otherwise. Of course, masters and servants had become citizens and hired help once the juster republic had declared itself. But masters and servants did not die out; nor did the essential inclinations of man.

Wadsworth did not think that he was judging the collector in an un-Christian fashion. His opinion had been forged on first contact, and confirmed on that third evening. The incident had been the crueller in that it had involved a child, a garden boy who had scarcely entered the years of understanding. The limner always felt tenderly toward children: for themselves, for the grateful fact that they overlooked his defect, and also because he had no issue himself. He had never known the company of a wife. Perhaps he might yet do so, though he would have to insure that she was beyond childbearing years. He could not inflict his defect on others. Some had tried explaining that his fears were unfounded, since the affliction had arrived not at birth but after an attack of the spotted fever when he was a boy of five. Further, they pressed, had he not made his way in the world, and might not a son of his, howsoever constructed, do likewise? Perhaps that would be the case, but what of a daughter? The notion of a girl living as an outcast was too much for him. True, she might stay at home, and there would be a shared sympathy between them. But what would happen to such a child after his death?

No, he would go home and paint his mare. This had always been his intention, and perhaps now he would execute it. She had been his companion for twelve years, understood him easily, and took no heed of the noises that issued from his mouth when they were alone in the forest. His plan had been this: to paint her, on the same size of canvas used for Mr. Tuttle, though turned on its horizontal axis, and, afterward, to cast a blanket over the picture and uncover it only on the mare’s death. It was presumptuous to compare the daily reality of God’s living creation with a human simulacrum formed by an inadequate hand—even if this was the very purpose for which his clients employed him.

He did not expect it would be easy to paint the mare. She would lack the patience, and the vanity, to stand immobile for him, one hoof proudly advanced. But, then, neither would his mare have the vanity to come around and examine the canvas even as he worked on it. The collector of customs was now doing so, leaning over his shoulder, peering and pointing. There was something he did not approve. Wadsworth glanced upward, from the immobile face to the mobile one. Even though he had a distant memory of speaking and hearing, he had never learned the facility of reading words upon the tongue. Wadsworth raised the narrowest of his brushes from the waistcoat button’s boss and transferred his eye to the notebook as the collector dipped his pen. “More dignity,” the man wrote, and then underlined the words.

Wadsworth felt that he had already given Mr. Tuttle dignity enough. He had increased his height, reduced his belly, ignored the hairy moles on the fellow’s neck, and generally attempted to represent surliness as diligence, irascibility as moral principle. And now he wanted more of it! This was an un-Christian demand, and it would be an un-Christian act on Wadsworth’s part to accede to it. It would do the man no service in God’s eyes if the limner allowed him to appear puffed up with all the dignity he demanded.

He had painted infants, children, men, and women, and even corpses. Three times he had urged his mare to a deathbed where he was asked to perform resuscitation—to represent as living someone he had just met as dead. If he could do that, surely he should be able to render the quickness of his mare as she shook her tail against the flies, or impatiently raised her neck while he prepared the little painting cart, or pricked her ears as he made noises to the forest.

At one time he had tried to make his meaning plain to his fellow-mortals by gesture and by sound. It was true that a few simple actions could be easily imitated: he could indicate, for example, how a client might wish to stand. But other gestures often resulted in humiliating games of guessing, while the sounds he was able to utter failed to establish either his requirements or his shared nature as a human being—part of the Almighty’s work, if differently made. Women judged the noises he made embarrassing, children found them a source of amusement, men a proof of imbecility. He had tried to advance in this way, but had not succeeded, and so he had retreated into the muteness they expected, and perhaps preferred. It was at this point that he had purchased his calfskin logbook, in which all human statement and opinion recurred. Do you think, sir, there will be painting in Heaven? Do you think, sir, there will be hearing in Heaven?

But his understanding of men, such as it had developed, came less from what they wrote down, more from his mute observation. Men—and women, too—imagined that they could alter their voice and meaning without its showing in their face. In this they were much deceived. His own face, as he observed the human carnival, was as inexpressive as his tongue, but his eye told him more than they could guess. Formerly, he had carried, inside his logbook, a set of handwritten cards, bearing useful responses, necessary suggestions, and civil corrections to what was being proposed. He even had one special card, for when he was being condescended to by his interlocutor beyond what he found proper. It read, “Sir, the understanding does not cease to function when the portals of the mind are blocked.” This was sometimes accepted as a just rebuke, sometimes held to be an impertinence from a mere artisan who slept in the stable. Wadsworth had abandoned its use, not because of either response but because it admitted too much knowledge. Those in the world of tongue held the advantage: they were his paymasters, they exercised authority, they entered society, they exchanged thoughts and opinions naturally. Though, for all this, Wadsworth did not see that speaking was in itself a promoter of virtue. His own advantages were only two: that he could represent on canvas those who spoke, and could silently perceive their meaning. It would have been foolish to give away this second advantage.

The business with the piano, for instance. Wadsworth had first inquired, by pointing to his fee scale, if the collector of customs wished for a portrait of the entire family, matching portraits of himself and his wife, or a joint portrait, with perhaps miniatures of the children. Mr. Tuttle, without looking at his wife, had pointed to his own breast and written on the fee sheet, “Myself alone.” Then he had glanced at his wife, put one hand to his chin, and added, “Beside the piano.” Wadsworth had noticed the handsome, claw-footed rosewood instrument, and asked with a gesture if he might go across to it. Whereupon he had demonstrated several poses: from sitting informally beside the open keyboard with a favorite song on display to standing more formally beside the instrument. Tuttle had taken Wadsworth’s place, arranged himself, advanced one foot, and then, after consideration, closed the piano lid. Wadsworth deduced from this that only Mrs. Tuttle played the piano; further, that Tuttle’s desire to include it was an indirect way of including her in the portrait. Indirect, and also less expensive.

The limner had shown the customs collector some miniatures of children, hoping to change his mind, but Tuttle merely shook his head. Wadsworth was disappointed, partly for reasons of money but more because his delight in painting children had increased as that in painting their progenitors had declined. Children were more mobile than adults, more deliquescent of shape, it was true. But they also looked him in the eye, and when you were deaf you heard with your eyes. Children held his gaze, and he thereby perceived their nature. Adults often looked away, whether from modesty or a desire for concealment, while some, like the collector, held his gaze challengingly, with a false honesty, as if to say, Yes, of course my eyes are concealing things, but you lack the discernment to realize it. Such clients judged Wadsworth’s affinity with children proof that he was as deficient in understanding as the children were. Whereas Wadsworth believed children’s affinity with him proof that they saw as clearly as he did.

When he had first taken up his trade, he had carried his brushes and pigments on his back, and walked the forest trails like a peddler. He found himself on his own, reliant upon recommendation and advertisement. But he was industrious and, being possessed of a companionable nature, grateful that his skill allowed him access to the lives of others. He would enter a household, and, whether placed in the stable, quartered with the help, or, very occasionally, and only in the most Christian of dwellings, treated like a guest, he had, for those few days, a function and a recognition. This did not mean that he was treated with any less condescension than other artisans, but at least he was being judged a normal human being; that is to say, one who merited condescension. He was happy, perhaps for the first time in his life.

And then, without any help beyond his own perceptions, he began to understand that he had more than just a function; he had strength of his own. This was not something that those who employed him would admit, but his eyes told him that it was the case. Slowly, he realized the truth of his craft: that the client was the master, except when he, James Wadsworth, was the client’s master. For a start, he was the client’s master when his eye discerned what the client would prefer him not to know. A husband’s contempt. A wife’s dissatisfaction. A deacon’s hypocrisy. A child’s suffering. A man’s pleasure at having his wife’s money to spend. A husband’s eye for the hired girl. Large matters in small kingdoms.

And, beyond this, he realized that when he rose in the stable and brushed the horsehair from his clothes, then crossed to the house and took up a brush made from the hair of another animal, he became more than he was taken for. Those who sat for him and paid him did not truly know what their money would buy. They knew what they had agreed on—the size of the canvas, the pose and the decorative elements (the bowl of strawberries, the bird on a string, the piano, the view from the window)—and from this agreement they inferred mastery. But this was the very moment at which mastery passed to the other side of the canvas. Hitherto in their lives they had seen themselves in looking glasses and hand mirrors, in the backs of spoons, and, dimly, in clear still water. It was even said that lovers were able to see their reflections in each other’s eyes, but the limner had no experience of this. Yet all such images depended upon the person in front of the glass, the spoon, the water, the eye. When Wadsworth provided his clients with their portraits, it was habitually the first time that they had seen themselves as someone else saw them. Sometimes, when the picture was presented, the limner would detect a sudden chill passing over the subject’s skin, as if he were thinking, So this is how I truly am? It was a moment of unaccountable seriousness: this image was how he would be remembered when he was dead. And there was a seriousness beyond even this. Wadsworth did not think himself presumptuous when his eye told him that often the subject’s next reflection was “And is this perhaps how the Almighty sees me, too?”

Those who did not have the modesty to be struck by such doubts tended to comport themselves as the collector now did: to ask for adjustments and improvements, to tell the limner that his hand and eye were faulty. Would they have the vanity to complain to God in His turn? “More dignity, more dignity.” An instruction all the more repugnant given Mr. Tuttle’s behavior in the kitchen two nights ago.

Wadsworth had been taking his supper, content with his day’s labor. He had just finished the piano. The instrument’s narrow leg, which ran parallel to Tuttle’s more massive limb, ended in a gilt claw, which Wadsworth had had some trouble representing. But now he was able to refresh himself, to stretch by the fire, to feed, and to observe the society of the help. There were more of these than expected. A collector of customs might earn fifteen dollars a week, enough to keep a hired girl. Yet Tuttle also kept a cook and a boy to work the garden. Since the collector did not appear to be a man lavish with his own money, Wadsworth deduced that it was Mrs. Tuttle’s portion that permitted such luxury of attention.

Once they became accustomed to his defect, the help treated him easily, as if his deafness rendered him their equal. It was an equality that Wadsworth was happy to concede. The garden boy, an elf with eyes of burnt umber, had taken to entertaining him with tricks. It was as if he imagined that the limner, being shorn of words, thereby lacked amusement. This was not the case, but Wadsworth indulged this indulgence of him and smiled as the boy turned cartwheels, stole up behind the cook while she bent to the bake oven, or played a guessing game with acorns hidden in his fists.

The limner had finished his broth and was warming himself before the fire—an element that Mr. Tuttle was not generous with elsewhere in the house—when an idea came to him. He drew a charred stick from the edge of the ashes, touched the garden boy on the shoulder to make him stay as he was, then pulled a drawing book from his pocket. The cook and the hired girl tried to watch what he was doing, but he held them away with a hand, as if to say that this particular trick, one he was offering in thanks for the boy’s own tricks, would not work if observed. It was a rough sketch—it could only be so, given the crudeness of the instrument—but it contained some part of a likeness. He tore the page from the book and handed it to the boy. The child looked up at him, with astonishment and gratitude, placed the sketch on the table, took Wadsworth’s drawing hand, and kissed it. I should always paint children, the limner thought, looking the boy in the eye.

He was almost unaware of the laughing tumult that broke out when the other two examined the drawing, and then of the silence that fell when the collector of customs, drawn by the sudden noise, entered the kitchen.

The limner watched as Tuttle stood there, one foot advanced, as in his portrait, his mouth opening and closing in a manner that did not suggest dignity. He watched as the cook and the girl rearranged themselves in more decorous attitudes. He watched as the boy, alert to his master’s gaze, picked up the drawing and modestly, proudly, handed it over. He watched as Tuttle took the paper calmly, examined it, looked at the boy, glanced at Wadsworth, nodded, then deliberately tore the sketch in four, placed it in the fire, waited until it blazed, said something further when in quarter-profile to the limner, and made his exit. He watched as the boy wept.

The portrait was finished: both rosewood piano and collector of customs gleamed. A small white customs house filled the window at Mr. Tuttle’s elbow—not that there was any real window there, or, if there had been, any customs house visible through it. Yet everyone understood this modest transcendence of reality. And perhaps the collector, in his own mind, was only asking for a similar transcendence of reality when he demanded more dignity. He was still leaning over Wadsworth, gesturing at the representation of his face, chest, leg. It did not matter in the least that the limner could not hear what he was saying. He knew exactly what was meant, and also how little it signified. Indeed, it was an advantage not to hear, for the particularities would doubtless have raised him to an even greater anger than that which he presently felt.

He reached for his notebook. “Sir,” he wrote, “We agreed upon five days for my labor. I must leave tomorrow morning by daybreak. We agreed that you would pay me tonight. Pay me, give me three candles, and by the morning I shall work such improvement as you require.”

It was rare for him to treat a client with so little deference. It would be bad for his reputation in the county, but he no longer cared. He offered the pen in the direction of Mr. Tuttle, who did not deign to receive it. Instead, he left the room. While waiting, the limner examined his work. It was well done: the proportions were pleasing, the colors harmonious, and the likeness within the bounds of honesty. The collector ought to be satisfied, posterity impressed, and his Maker—always assuming he was vouchsafed Heaven—not too rebuking.

Tuttle returned and handed over six dollars—half the fee—and two candles. Doubtless the cost of them would be deducted from the second half of the fee when it came to be paid. If it came to be paid. Wadsworth looked long at the portrait, which, over the last days, had come to assume for him equal reality with its fleshly subject, and then he made several decisions.

He took his supper as usual in the kitchen. His companions had been subdued these last two nights. He did not think they blamed him for the incident with the garden boy; at most, they thought his presence had led to their own misjudgment, and so they were chastened. This, at any rate, was how Wadsworth saw matters, and he did not think that their meaning would be clearer if he could hear speech or read lips; indeed, perhaps the opposite. If his notebook of men’s thoughts and observations was anything to judge by, the world’s knowledge of itself, when spoken and written down, did not amount to much.

This time, he selected a piece of charcoal more carefully and, with his pocketknife, scraped its end to a semblance of sharpness. Then, as the boy sat opposite him, immobile more through apprehension than through a sitter’s sense of duty, the limner drew him again. When he had finished, he tore out the sheet and, with the boy’s eyes upon him, folded it, mimed the act of concealing it beneath his shirt, and handed it across the table. The boy immediately did as he had seen, and smiled for the first time that evening. Then, sharpening his piece of charcoal before each task, Wadsworth drew the cook and the hired girl. Each took the folded sheet and concealed it without looking. Then he rose, shook their hands, embraced the garden boy, and returned to his night’s work.

“More dignity,” he repeated to himself as he lit the candles and took up his brush. Well, then, a dignified man is one whose appearance implies a lifetime of thought, one whose brow expresses it. Yes, there was an improvement to be made there. He measured the distance between the eyebrow and the hairline, and at the midpoint, in line with the right eyeball, he developed the brow: an enlargement, a small mound, almost as if something were beginning to grow. Then he did the same above the left eye. Yes, that was better. But dignity was also to be inferred from the state of a man’s chin. Not that there was anything patently insufficient about Tuttle’s jawline. But perhaps the discernible beginnings of a beard might help—a few touches on each point of the chin. Nothing to cause immediate remark, let alone offense, merely an indication.

And perhaps another indication was required. He followed the collector’s sturdily dignified leg down its stockinged calf to the buckled shoe. Then he followed the parallel leg of the piano down from the closed keyboard lid to the gilt claw that had so delayed him. Perhaps that trouble could have been avoided? The collector had not specified that the piano be rendered exactly. If a little transcendence had been applied to the window and the customs house, why not to the piano as well? The more so since the spectacle of a claw beside a customs man might suggest a grasping and rapacious nature, which no client would wish implied, whether there was evidence for it or not. Wadsworth therefore painted out the feline paw and replaced it with a quieter hoof, gray in color and lightly bifurcated.

Habit and prudence urged him to snuff out the two candles he had been awarded, but the limner decided to leave them burning. They were his now—or, at least, he would have paid for them soon. He washed his brushes in the kitchen, packed his painting box, saddled his mare, and harnessed the little cart to her. She seemed as happy to leave as he. As they walked from the stable, he saw windows outlined by candlelight. He hauled himself into the saddle, the mare moved beneath him, and he began to feel cold air on his face. At daybreak, an hour from now, his penultimate portrait would be examined by the hired girl pinching out the wasteful candles. He hoped that there would be painting in Heaven, but more than this he hoped that there would be deafness in Heaven. The mare, soon to be the subject of his final portrait, found her own way to the trail. After a while, with Mr. Tuttle’s house far behind them, Wadsworth shouted into the silence of the forest. ♦

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